Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

Yes to everything except the first statement:

> The answer is antitrust.

Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly, I agree

But another answer is "Firefox"

I would love to say another answer is "Firefox" (which is my default browser), but Mozilla have gotten fat of Googles money over the years and got distracted by other things.

It isn't a coincidence that Google continue to fund Mozilla: Firefox is, arguably, a fig leaf. A few hundred million a year is a small price to pay to Google if they have even a semi-willing participant in allowing them to bulldoze through the standards bodies.

Controlled opposition to avoid anti-trust is a MegaCorp's standard operation procedure.

So why do people choose Chrome?

(I use chrome, but I am unable to articulate why. Surely some of you know why you use Chrome :-))

I would love if some of these projects that fall backward into loads of money would stay lean, and invest that money in a way that allowed them to become truly independent. So when the money dries up, or the funding becomes dirty, they have the freedom to cut ties and continue their lean operations, self-funded by the interest from their investments.

> Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly

No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.

> If you only want capitalism

Yeah, I prefer not to die in a coal mine at ripe age of 14, so a coal baron can increase their wealth by 0.001%.

> So why do people choose Chrome?

It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.

(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)

Chrome is explicitly “not what I use” however there are literally services I cannot use on a firefox derived browser so I must have a chromium derived browser installed and occasionally use it.

For a normal user they would just switch back to chrome because that is what works, they don’t care about our complaints, they care that what they want to use works.

Because, last time I tried it, Firefox decided to force Pocket integration and I accidentally uploaded some of my bookmarks.

Also performance, but the behaviour of Mozilla is the main reason I keep away.

Pocket - fair enough (though Google probably uploads all it can). But performance? No way. Unless you are talking about Google properties which are specifically un-optimized for Firefox, in which case I don't think it is Firefox you should avoid.

Capitalism is a great model that results in evolutionary pressures for the efficient development of goods and services.

One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.

In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.

Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.

Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.

They instead shovel increasing amount of money into the pockets of ‘leadership’, despite showing signs of nothing but failure at everything they do.

Yes but that isn't optimal for the personal profit of the leadership making those decisions.

Mercantile capitalism was regulated and under the power of colonizer states though. The East India Company had to follow the British Crown orders, as were the different transatlantic companies. The competition was mostly between nation-state rather than between companies. Actually, China started consolidating its industry and "Capitalism with chineese characteristic" look a lot like modern mercantile capitalism.

> But performance?

A decade ago, yes. Firefox did have poor performance. It has gotten much better since.

Yes, that is correct

If you want capitalism to be the best it can be you need to brake up monopolies, continuously

You also need to manage externalities.

Totally

Capitalism is defensible as an economic system

It is indefensible as a social system. It must be subordinate to the social arrangements

I agree. The endgame for capitalism is a mega-corp roleplaying as state. You get food, housing, and so on, but you may never leave it. You will live however long the CEOs need you to live and not a second more.